Once all the boxes were stacked safely where we could get to them and they wouldn’t fall over and crush anyone, I asked the warp crystal to restore normal inertia inside its domain, and then Breeze and Enny and I communed with it for a while thinking happy thoughts to reward it for getting us all to our new home safely. In my mindscape this meant I spent an hour polishing the dragon’s scales, while Breeze danced for its amusement and Enny fed it cupcakes. This wasn’t a proper virtual reality where we were actually linked – I only had the vaguest sense of how they were rewarding it and no idea at all what they envisioned it as.

Or I mean, I wouldn’t have if I hadn’t asked them later. Breeze saw it as a feathery serpent, and Enny as a kind of robot raptor… and both of them interpreted my ‘reward through physical contact’ as me having sex with the thing. I guess I have a reputation.

“So… yeah,” I said to them afterwards, doing a post-thankfully-not-literal-mortem. “When the raft started spinning I was really worried everyone was going to be crushed, and I guess it picked up on that. It’s always been extra-helpful – that’s why we picked it, remember?”

“Extra-helpful for *you*,” Enny noted. The crystal still liked them, but under their guidance would get moods where it slipped into malicious compliance. That’s why I’d been the pilot.

“I still think you shouldn’t anthropomorphize it,” said Prism, who was sitting in despite having absolutely zero talent for warp-crystal manipulation, because they thought they were in charge.

“And that’s why we’re the ones who talk to it,” Breeze said. “That sort of attitude would just make it angry.”

“I don’t even think we can make it angry,” I said. “It’s a good boy. The goodest boy.”

“So how soon can your ‘good boy’ get the defensive protocols up and running?” Prism asked.

“The what?” I asked.

“We covered those before you joined us,” Breeze said. I’d originally intended to be part of the assembly team, working with machines and construction, but then it turned out I could talk to warp crystals which was super rare, so I’d been transferred. “They’re only supposed to be used if we land on a populated world, and we were headed way out past the frontier, so it was never a priority.”

“Well, it’s a priority now,” Prism said. “I don’t know about any ‘pony princess’ but someone threw a moon at us.”

“Throwing a moon is the crazy part,” I said. “Why would you be skeptical about the part that makes sense?”

“You should be skeptical about everything,” Prism retorted. “I’m skeptical that you didn’t just fuck up completely and make up a convenient story about a mobile moon to cover for yourself. But just in case you’re telling the truth, we should be prepared for visitors.”

“Prepared to kill them?” Breeze asked, their faceplate’s mouth-line curving into a frown.

“We can do catch-and-release,” Enny said.

“As long as they don’t get their grubby little paws –”

“Hooves,” I interjected.

Prism continued, hardly missing a beat, “—hooves on our warp crystal, I don’t care if you hold a tea party for them. But right now we’ve got everything in one big room on the surface and that isn’t safe.”

Breeze still looked uncertain. Enny put a hand on their shoulder and smiled. “We can go through the tutorial with Wave, since she never did it back at the academy.”

“Yeah, I’m kind of curious now,” I said. “When can we start?”

The answer was ‘soon’, but there was some administrivia to deal with first – finding kobolds to assign to my command, and linking all our faceplates together so that I could command them. Then Plus had to dig a syringe out of storage and stick me in the neck with it, because defense mode required a closer connection to the warp crystal and that apparently involved the sort of drugs that can only be administered with giant syringes. The upshot was that Prism was getting really impatient by the time we were ready to start, pacing from one end of the space raft to the other and looking out the windows at the desolate landscape to keep watch for the army of moon ponies that surely was on its way.

Finally, we were ready. I sat in Enny’s lap – too dizzy from the drugs to stand – and let them steady me while I buried the warp crystal, freed from its elastic bonds, in my chest-fluff to keep it close to my heart.

“Step one,” Breeze said, reading out of the tutorial, “Link up with the warp crystal. I need you to go into your mindscape, and get as close as possible to the crystal’s representation. Sit on its throne with it – that’s how you envision it, right?”

It was, but the dragon was huge and the throne was huge and I was not really tall enough to even reach the dragon’s lap. I imagined myself taking a running start, and giving my best high jump… and then the dragon’s teeth snapped shut around my middle, plucking me out of the air. “Um…” I said, then squeaked as it shifted its grip to take my head in its jaws instead, then tilted its head back to swallow. Gravity dragged me into its throat, and then it was warm and wet and tight and dark for what seemed like an eternity until I finally felt the urge to open my eyes… and I was the dragon, with a squirmy little lump in my belly, making me feel delightfully full.

“Are you okay?” Enny asked. Apparently my squirming hadn’t been entirely restricted to the mindscape.

“I think it worked,” I said, my own voice echoing strangely in my ears.

“Step two,” Breeze said, unconcerned. “Engage defense mode.”

“How?” I asked.

“It should be instinctual,” they replied. “The warp crystal is trained in the procedure.”

“Can you tell me what’s supposed to happen?” I asked. “It sends us underground somehow, I know that much…”

“We turn the rock below us to cake, then increase our density so that we sink,” Enny explained.

“Alright,” I said, imagining doing that, since as far as I could tell I was the warp crystal at the moment. The part of me that was aware of the outside world noticed the windows going dark, so apparently it had worked.

“Oh wait, we skipped a step,” Breeze said. “That was step three. Step two is to engage the HUD.”

My faceplate blanked out without warning, then lit up with an abstract control interface, complete with a button labelled ‘enter defense mode’. I flicked my attention to activate it, and red error messages spilled rapidly into the log… but the last message was a bright green ‘defense mode activated’, so all’s well that ends well I guess.

After that it was simple. The interface had a 2-meter grid, and I could mark squares for removal, which would turn those cubes of rock into cake. My underlings, guided by their own faceplates, would then go and dig out the cake, leaving a 2-meter wide corridor and then a room large enough to set up the general-purpose fabricator. The waste cake was shoved in a matter compressor for use as raw materials later… that wasn’t actually indicated on my HUD anywhere but I’d been trained in the assembly team side of this sort of operation so I knew how it worked.

When we say ‘cake’, keep in mind that we don’t mean frosting-covered sweet bread. Warp crystals can do a lot of things, but for elemental transmutation we use a different device. What ‘turning it to cake’ does is weaken many of the crystal and/or ionic bonds, leaving a dense, caked mass of very fine dust that can easily be disassembled by hand… or by putting too much pressure on it, or by sucking it into a hose connected to the matter compressor if one wants to be efficient and not get dust everywhere.

No, the strange, inexplicable part is that it only works on ‘rock’ or ‘dirt’ and not on plants or people or even sufficiently rich veins of ore. Fortunately, this moon was not made of cheese, so we were able to dig normally.

“You’re doing great!” Breeze said. “The rest of the tutorial covers some advanced concepts. First, it doesn’t use a lot of energy to mark squares for removal, but the warp crystal does have limited energy.”

“Right, the mana bar,” I said, having noticed it earlier.

“It’s not mana, it’s warp energy.”

“It’s blue, and it goes down when I cast spells,” I said.

“Whatever.” Their eyespots shifted to horizontal slits, while their mouth went all jagged. “How much do you have left?”

“It’s full,” I said.

Breeze’s eye-slits tilted inwards. “That’s impossible. Just entering defense mode should have taken you down to half.”

“Sure, but it regenerates,” I said. “It filled back up while I was marking the big room.”

“Alright… try selecting ‘expand domain’?” Breeze suggested.

The map suddenly got a little smaller, as the warp crystal increased its range of influence. This cost about half the bar, but it immediately started filling back up. I did it again, and noticed that it was filling faster. “It looks like we’re drawing more mana –”

“Warp energy,” Breeze hissed.

“Um, we’re regenerating faster the larger I make it.” I hit it a third time when the bar got back up to half. “Hee, this is like a clicker game. Is there any way to make the bar bigger?”

“I think you’ve got the gist of it,” Breeze said, their expression still rattled. “Come on, let’s bring her out.”

I turned my focus back to the mindscape, and the now-resting lump in my belly. “Out, huh.”

“Just get down off the throne,” Enny said.

“I’m kind of trapped,” I sort of explained. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t normal to imagine the dragon *eating* me so I was a bit leery of explaining in full.

“Then get untrapped,” Breeze said. “Come on.”

“Alright, alright, just let me think,” I said. How did you get out of a dragon’s belly? Did dragons vomit?

I didn’t want to vomit. I also didn’t want to come back to myself in a pile of shit, even if it was imaginary. That left… an egg? I’d always imagined the warp crystal as a male dragon, but males with vaginas weren’t particularly strange among kobolds. I imagined the lump inside me hardening into a solid ovoid, then travelling through my body towards my birth canal… I shifted on the throne to expose my crotch, and stroked downwards along my belly-scales to urge the egg along…

I’ve heard that giving birth is painful for many creatures, but kobolds have an easy time with it, and my only real point of reference was the eggs I’d laid personally. So it was an overwhelming, but sensual and pleasant experience to lay my egg, and I moaned with release as it plopped to the floor…

…and the mindscape shattered as I was back in my own body, wracked by orgasm and spraying semen all over a very surprised-looking Breeze’s faceplate as they leaned forwards to snatch the warp crystal out of my faltering grasp. “Fuck,” I said. “Sorry?” I wiped some of the cum off their faceplate with my hand, but it mostly just smeared so I used my much fluffier tail. I’d gotten enough on myself that I was going to need a bath anyway.

“It’s fine,” they said. “It’s not unusual to make a mess the first time, although it’s usually the merging that’s the exciting part.”

It was going to take a while for the digging team to clear out all the cake, and even longer for the assembly team to set up the general-purpose fabricator, so we had a bunch of time with nothing to do. Of course Plus had to ruin it by pinging everyone who wasn’t busy to meet with her in the virtual Garden. It took a couple of minutes for everyone to trickle in, which meant she could have just as well had us meet in a corner of the raft in real life, but whatever.

“I’ve completed the analysis of the local biosphere,” she said. She’d taken the form of a bipedal lizard with giant breasts for some reason, that reason almost certainly being that she liked having giant breasts, despite none of us having breasts of any size in real life. Many of the people present found it hard to look away – they jiggled whenever she talked or moved, and it was kind of mesmerizing even though I wasn’t really into them. I had to tear my gaze away from the wobbling scaly flesh as she spun in place, so that I could look at the presentation she was showing us.

She pointed at a pie chart. “Atmosphere is terrifyingly good. A bit thin, but the oxygen level is higher to compensate. Humans could breathe it.” The display shifted, and she pointed at a bar chart. “The surface dust can be converted into food and water without any transmutation. I haven’t analyzed the cake we’re digging out but at a glance it looks like the same stuff.” She turned back towards us, as the display was replaced by giant letters spelling out ‘CONCLUSION’.

“There’s effectively no limit to the carrying capacity of this world, so we should start breeding as soon as possible,” she finished.

“How soon is that?” someone asked.

“Now,” said about half the crowd, before she could answer, some of them also giggling.

Plus nodded. “I want everyone pregnant by the end of the day. Ship day. I wasn’t able to get a straight answer from the pilot about how long the local days are.”

“The moon swerved out of its orbit to catch us,” I said, being the pilot in question. “The day’s probably however long the pony princess wants it to be.”

Enny groaned. “Not this again.” At least they didn’t say it loud enough for many of us to hear it over the general chatter.

The message received, I woke myself up. Enny woke up a few seconds later.

“So,” I said to them, smiling sweetly under my faceplate and not entirely sure what it was showing them, “want to work on this assignment together?”

They tilted their head. “I figured you’d be pairing up with Spots.”

“He won’t touch me in real life. I’m kind of dumpy.” I picked at my boring dusty-brown fur listlessly. I mean, he wasn’t wrong.

“Let’s grab Breeze and we can make a threesome,” Enny suggested. “You already squirted all over us, might as well squirt inside.”

We hadn’t wandered far, so it was a bit of a surprise to find Breeze doing something with the warp crystal – had they not been at the meeting? They were out of it, so probably merged, and like they’d said it had made them rather dramatically aroused. I reached up for their cock, then looked over at Enny and flicked an ear. Their faceplate shifted into an evil grin, so I cracked mine open and slipped Breeze’s cock into my mouth, closing my hand around the base of their shaft, while Enny bent down under their tail and and started fingering their vulva.

They twitched, immediately, and I hadn’t had time to do much sucking before they shivered from ears to tail and then carefully set the warp crystal down on the floor. “What brought this on?”

“Breeding time,” Enny helpfully explained, with a little ‘schlick’ as one of their claws thrust abruptly inside.

Breeze put their hands on my shoulders and pushed me away, off of their penis. “Turn around then,” they said. “I can’t breed with your mouth.”

I got down on my hands and knees, facing away from them, lifting my tail and spreading my legs a bit to show myself off. They wasted no time sliding inside me, claws reaching around to take firm hold of my chest plate for better leverage for their thrust. It wasn’t the same as virtual sex – a bit more pain, a bit less pleasure – but Breeze knew me well enough not to waste time on foreplay, at least.

I’d kind of expected Enny to take Breeze in turn, since they’d already been behind them and playing with their labia, but instead they came around in front and cracked open their faceplate, licking their tongue all over the slick surface of mine. “She already shot off once,” Enny explained, as they got their hands underneath me and started lifting me up, tilting the two of us back until I was sitting impaled in Breeze’s lap. “We’d better not waste her second orgasm. The sperm count drops each time, after all.”

I’m pretty sure that was a myth for kobolds, but I wasn’t about to complain. I dug my claws into the fuzzier parts of their back as they climbed up on top of me, and buried myself in fluffy warmth, the filling in a delicious kobold sandwich. We writhed and moaned, flexed and thrust and of course I lost – was it ever in doubt? I was always on a hair trigger even when I wasn’t being double-teamed.

Once I’d finished pumping Enny full, they pried themselves off me and helped Breeze lower me to the ground, on my back… without pulling out, although they did stop thrusting for a bit while we were shifting positions. Then Enny took Breeze from behind while they finished up, and I got to play the part of a well-stuffed pillow, clinging to Breeze from below as Enny went to town to complete the set.

“I need to apologize to Spots,” I said afterwards, still the bottom of a kobold-pile while we cuddled a bit in the afterglow. “That wouldn’t have worked in co-op mode.”

Biometrics said all three of us had managed to induce ovulation, but that didn’t stop Enny and me from taking another turn with each other, just to make sure. Breeze bowed out, though, sticking a completely-ordinary-sized syringe into their arm and re-merging with the warp crystal to do… whatever they were doing with the warp crystal. Like before, it left them obviously aroused.

“You should fill them up while they’re distracted,” I said, petting Enny’s ears while they slowly thrust into me. We weren’t going for anything that intense this time, just some nice lazy screwing.

“I’m pretty sure that would distract them from whatever they’re doing,” Enny said, giving a sudden, deep trust and then exploding inside me again. “They seemed to think it was important.”

I didn’t respond for a few seconds, savoring the spreading warmth, and the way Enny twitched in pleasure as the last few spurts squeezed their way out of their cock.

“You had the full training too, didn’t you?” I asked, once we were effectively back to slightly sticky cuddling. “Any ideas?”

“I haven’t given it any thought,” they said. “We’ve been busy.”

I glanced up at the warp crystal, its purple glow seeping from between Breeze’s claws. “I could go commune with it normally. Might get a sense of what they’re up to.”

“Why? You don’t think they’re up to something evil, do you?” Her expression was amused instead of worried. I’m pretty sure mine was… anxious.

I gave it a little thought. Did I actually think Breeze was going to betray us? I couldn’t even think of how they’d do that. But still… “I think I’m just impatient to try working with it again,” I said. “And if I knew what they were doing, I’d know how long they were going to take.”

“Ah,” Enny said, petting my ears. “It’s a clicker, you said.”

I cringed. “Oh shit.” I mean, I’d been joking, but…

They extricated themselves from my grasp, and I sat up and fussed with my fur a bit, uselessly since I was pretty filthy by this point. “I only clicked three times,” I pointed out.

“And you’ve been fretting over it ever since,” Enny retorted. “Go talk to Null, or at least get out of sight of the thing until you can detox.”

So I went looking for a bath. We didn’t have the facilities for a real shower set up yet, or the water to spare – although both of those would come quickly, once the fabricator was set up – but the matter compressor was full of dust, so I joined the cloud of kobolds taking a dust-bath, and spent a happy but not otherwise memorable half hour or so getting somewhat cleaner. It did manage to distract me from the warp crystal, and I don’t think I was actually reward-locked just by clicking three times anyway.

We take reward-locking seriously, mostly because of the virtual world. It would be trivially easy to program a simple routine that made you have orgasms constantly. You wouldn’t get bored. You wouldn’t get tired. No actual chemistry is happening, so you wouldn’t run out of dopamine or whatever and have the intensity of the orgasms gradually decrease. You might be able to turn the program off, assuming you had the presence of mind to include an off switch, but it’s a bad bet and someone would probably have to rescue you… and half the time even a short stint reward-locked like that would render you useless for any purpose and… the options from there are all bad.

Clickers aren’t as bad. Being reward-locked by a clicker doesn’t usually take up *all* your time and you’ll probably get sick of it after a week or two… but that’s a week or two where you’ll be operating at drastically reduced efficiency and annoying everyone around you with your obsession. You can joke about clickers, and try recovering on your own before you get help – ancient society was riddled with them and still mostly functioned. But at the core, it’s the same mechanism, so they’re heavily discouraged.

I’m a bit of a not-all-that-special case because of my all-but-documented sex addiction. I’m not addicted! I can go without sex for long periods of time! What I can’t do is easily say no without a good reason, unfortunately, so I don’t generally go long periods of time and no one believes me. And no, ‘proving that I can’ is not a good enough reason to turn down someone I like who looks like they might be in the mood.

‘I just got out of the bath and I’m already quite sated’ is, though, so as I looked around at the pairs and triples still working on Plus’s assignment, I was able to wave off the ones who invited me to join. I did track down Spots, because I was worried about him, but he’d managed to find three of his other regular girls, and one of them had taken him from behind while the other two kept him focused on being a male, so he was (a) good and (b) didn’t want to talk about it, or at least that’s what he claimed after complaining about having had to do it.

So he didn’t need my help, and as I’ve mentioned, he wasn’t very interested in me when we aren’t virtual, because I’m not actually a girl despite everyone else assuming I am. I don’t care. I don’t care what pronouns people use for me, so I don’t correct them, and I don’t like confrontation so I don’t object when others correct people if they aren’t using female pronouns for me, and somehow this fools everyone but Spots, who is probably the only person it would be convenient to fool.

“There’s a big communal dust bath over by the matter compressor if you want to clean up,” I suggested. I’d obviously just dusted myself off so it wasn’t a proposition.

“Too busy,” Spots said, sitting with his back against a box, his tail curved over his lap to hide the worst of the mess, while he typed away in midair. “The network’s acting weird.”

I didn’t offer to help because I don’t know anything about that. I could listen, though. “Want to talk about it?”

He didn’t respond, which I took as a ‘no’.

Since I wasn’t able to do my job with Breeze hogging the warp crystal, and most of the rest of us were just fucking or fucking around or hanging out, I decided to find a quiet place to sit down and log back on to the virtual world. I know, I know, I’d just spent six months trapped there, so I should have been sick of it, but right after landing there are basically no amenities in real life, and I wanted to be something other than myself anyway. I put on my sexy female otter form and preened in a mirror for a bit, then called up the directory to see if anyone else was around to talk to.

Star was on, and a couple other people I didn’t know as well, but there were also a couple of guest accounts logged in. Was the pony princess back? The directory gave their location, so I teleported to the closest teleport spot, then ran around a bit through the mazelike industrial zone until I finally caught up. They looked like a pair of generic kobolds, with the icons ‘1’ and ‘2’ on their shoulder and hip-plates – the default guest bodies, in other words.

“Hey there!” I called out to them, swimming through the air because, well, because I felt like it. Actually walking with tiny otter legs is not a lot of fun. “What’s with the guest accounts?”

They turned and looked at me, faceplates glowing with wide eyes and distressed, jaggy mouths. “Is this your dream?” asked Guest1.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Princess Luna asked us to investigate this dream, and we’ve been searching for the dreamer for hours,” Guest1 said.

“Minutes, anyway,” Guest2 commented.

“It’s not a dream!” was my immediate reaction, but I realized that that was stupid – if they were really sent by the pony princess, who I was absolutely certain had not been a prank thanks to the accelerating moon, then I couldn’t expect them to know what our virtual world was. “It’s not exactly a dream,” I added quickly, “but if it was I’d be one of the dreamers? We all share. Where are you connecting from? Do you want a real account? I could ask Spots to make some for you.”

“Account?” asked Guest2. “Like a bank account?”

Um… “I guess, except that instead of money it just stores your preferences. Like, do you want to be a kobold like in real life, or would you rather be an otter? Who do you consider your friends? What are your favorite games? That sort of thing.”

“Do we get interest?” Guest1 asked.

“That depends entirely on how interesting you are,” I replied, smirking. “Do you have real names? You’re labelled ‘Guest1’ and ‘Guest2’ right now.”

“Jerome,” said Guest1.

Guest2 was “Larry. What’s your name?”

My name should have been the most obvious thing about me, but if these were aliens who thought they were somehow connecting to a dream… “Um… I’m Wave. How are you connecting?”

Guest1 started to explain, “We searched for your dream with the big cauldron, then –"

“Are you sure we should tell her? They’re alien invaders,” Guest2 said, interrupting them. Or ‘him’, probably, with a name like Jerome, assuming it wasn’t a complete coincidence, and that whatever weird mechanism was letting us understand each other was translating the names as well.

“I just meant that you don’t seem to be getting all the metadata, or you wouldn’t have to ask my name,” I said, holding up my arms to look less threatening or something.

“I don’t know what that word means,” Guest1 said.

“Technobabble,” Guest2 suggested.

“What it means,” I said, “is that you’re not connected properly so you’re only getting about half the functionality. If you’re connecting to this like it was a dream, that would probably explain it? It’s not really my area. But we could probably rig up something to let you connect normally if you came here in person.”

“Is that an invitation?” Guest1 asked. “We know where you are, your landing was hard to miss.”

“Well… sure, you’re invited,” I said. “Just be careful, you might have to deal with some traps and puzzles.” I didn’t think we’d be able to arrange for any monsters. “It’s traditional.”

They stared at me.

“I’ll try to make sure they’re nonlethal!”

So I called a meeting. I never call meetings; I don’t have a job where calling meetings really makes sense. I was giddy as I confirmed that this was what I really wanted to do, and then instantly terrified after the network actually went and pinged everyone. We met in one of the meeting halls in the virtual world; the big chamber we were digging would probably have worked but virtual meetings are always easier.

Once everyone was gathered, I blurted out “Aliens!”

“Aren’t we the aliens?” Star asked.

“Yes but they can show up in our virtual world using the guest accounts,” I said. “I asked them to come over so we can give them a proper terminal.”

“For free? Shouldn’t we be charging?” Fire asked.

“Oh, I didn’t think of that,” I said. “Maybe the first few can be samples? We do want to talk to them right?” We didn’t use money internally – we were a collective – but we did sometimes have to deal with people who weren’t in a collective, so we’d all gotten the basic economic training. I knew what money *was*. Also, money was used in a lot of games although you had to be careful not to let collecting money turn into a quasi-clicker.

Prism, who looked kind of annoyed or maybe that was my exaggeration since their avatar was a cluster of butterflies, asked, “Why didn’t you call the meeting before asking them to come? We’re really not set up for visitors.”

“I know I know I promised them traps, and I’m not even sure we’ll have an exit dug out. I just wanted to make sure that people knew they seemed friendly and laid out the friendly traps. And didn’t shoot them.” We didn’t bring weapons, but we brought the general purpose fabricator, and it had no problem at all making guns.

“I’ll dig an exit first thing,” Breeze promised.

“You’ll *mark* an exit. We’ll be the ones digging,” Squirrel replied

“There’s already enough room to set up the simple fabricator elements,” Star said. “We can have snares and pits. Gravity’s pretty light here so the pits shouldn’t hurt anyone too bad. I don’t know about making rigs for aliens, though.”

“As long as they have hands, we can just give them a screen and a keyboard,” Spots suggested.

“That’s hardly a proper terminal,” Dot replied. “We need to brain-scan them so we can make it immersive.”

“I’d really rather get some of the other medical equipment squared away first,” Plus said. “But talking to the locals is important, I guess. I won’t stand in the way.”

“It sounds like we have a consensus?” I asked.

“You didn’t leave us much choice,” Prism said. “But it looks like it.”

My punishment was swift, and also not really a punishment either in the ‘intended to annoy me’ or ‘actually annoyed me’ senses. Breeze had the most experience with defense mode, so they were the one working the warp crystal, and everyone else who wasn’t involved with setting up the fabricator or other critical tasks (Plus continued to monitor everyone’s health, and Spotty continued to try to figure out how the aliens kept accessing the network, for two) got tagged as a worker drone for Breeze to order around.

Which was fine by me – yeah, I loved my actual job but assembly was the job I’d picked, and I liked it well enough. We didn’t have enough suction tubes at first, so I spent a while clawing cake to bits with my bare claws with a bunch of other kobolds, while a single worker with a suction tube cleaned up after us. Once some of the basic fabrication units were online we all got our own suction tubes and that maybe wasn’t *quite* as fun as playing in the dust, but it went a lot faster.

And there was so much to dig out! We weren’t going to let the aliens visit our space raft or the fabricator, so we had a big, fake ‘central lair’ chamber for them to sneak into if they got past all the traps, with a double height ceiling, a big glowing crystal lamp that kind of looked like a warp crystal if you’ve never seen one, and comfortable furniture that looked like it was made out of recycled crates. That was Star’s idea – in case the aliens had read our minds and knew what to look for, they might be tricked into thinking they’d found it.

Then there was a big warren of private chambers for each of us. Not very big, but it meant we could have our own space to hoard things mostly. And to sleep in, out of the way. Maybe to have sex in in private, if we felt like pretending it was shameful, which was a couple of peoples’ kink. At the far end of it was a room for the eggs, and some space for toilets and wet baths although of course those weren’t set up yet and anyone who really had to go would just do it right into the backup matter compressor. On the other side from the central lair was a room marked ‘cafeteria’ with a kitchen and pantry, and then of course a bunch of recreational tunnels that would eventually make their way to the surface, which we were going to fill with traps.

I ran into a vein of ore that didn’t get caked digging out the cafeteria, which probably meant that we’d be changing the plan around a bit because mining ore needed heavier equipment than we had built just yet. But it wasn’t like we had any food to serve there, and we could always just eat in the lair.

Once things were winding down, and most of the remaining work was being left to the people who’d actually trained for it, I got a weird ‘go to’ order that led me into one of the side passages in the recreational tunnels. I advanced carefully – this part had been completed so there weren’t any construction notes for it anymore, and it was almost certainly trapped. I froze at a glint of light reflecting off a tripwire, and carefully stepped over it, then hopped over a section of flooring that was a little *too* smooth.

The ’go to’ order vanished, then reappeared telling me to step on the trap. “Breeze!” I complained. Since I was one of her drones she might have even heard it. Otherwise she was just responding to my hesitation.

“We need to make sure they aren’t lethal,” she sent back, making the text appear briefly on my faceplate. The ‘go to’ order flashed a few more times, then beeped with urgency.

Since the next level of ‘worker drone do this thing really’ was electric shocks, and we *did* need to test the traps, I rolled my eyes and stepped on it.

Sure enough, it was a pit. I’d braced myself for a fall… for a two meter, maybe four meter fall. It was a lot deeper than that! I had time to scream in terror before hitting the bouncy net, and then more time to squeak and grunt as I bounced up and down in the pit, banging against the sides occasionally, until enough of my momentum was lost that I could grab hold until it was finally still.

A secret door opened at the bottom of the pit, under the net. Enny was there, grinning up at me. “What do you think?”

“That was fun!” I said. “How do I get out?”

“I mean, you’re not supposed to?” they said. “You should probably try though.”

I tried some obvious things first. I crawled around on the net to see if I could unhook it, but it was welded to a ring set flush against the stone walls, and all of it made out of structural plastic that I wasn’t going to be able to chew through. I mean, I tried – when we crack our faceplates it cracks them along the mouth-line which is usually pretty jaggy if we’re about to bite something, and it gives the resulting ‘teeth’ a sharp edge. But it’s mainly meant for gripping and eating and maybe fighting and kissing, and not for sawing through thick, stretchy cables.

So I started bouncing up and down, to see if I could get back to the top that way. Bounce. Bounce. BOUNCE. BOUNCE. When I got as high as I could manage before the dampening effect counteracted what I could add on each bounce, I reached up and… was still three meters short of the trapdoor, which had closed behind me anyway and probably only opened down.

“Alright, I give up. It seems pretty solid,” I said, once I’d gotten it to stop bouncing again. Enny hit a button on the wall underneath the trap, and the ring holding the net in place lost its rigidity, letting it snap tight around me. I dropped the last three meters with an “Oof!”

They picked me up, net and all, and tossed me over their shoulder, hauling me back through the service tunnels.

“I can walk, you know,” I said, inverted and thoroughly tied up.

“No you can’t, you’re trapped in a net.”

“You can let me out of the net.”

“I think it takes special tools,” they replied.

We were basically home anyway by that point. The assembly team used their special tools to get me loose, and we all gathered in the central lair to watch the aliens approach on a big screen someone had set up. We’d finished just in time!

…and all our traps were useless.

The aliens could fly. Not even with wings – they just hovered in midair in exactly the way frilled lizard creatures usually don’t. They *had* legs, but they didn’t use them.

One of them accidentally brushed a tripwire with his tail, and the snare snapped closed around it! He stopped for about two seconds, then squeezed his tail out of the snare as if he didn’t have any bones.

“Do we have time to set up some sleep darts?” Prism asked.

“Would they be safe?” Plus said. “We know nothing about their biology.”

“And they might pop,” I added. “They kind of look like balloons.”

At least the maze was still a maze – they didn’t seem to have any supernatural maze-navigating properties, and they didn’t walk through the walls or anything. So when they made it to our central lair, we all cheered and welcomed them in.

“They’re cartoons,” Star said quietly, and seeing their expressions I had to agree – lizard faces don’t bend that way. Lizard bodies don’t compress like that when hugged. Lizards also don’t float in midair so that was another thing that we’d already covered. They weren’t as cartoonish as the pony princess in the virtual world had been, at least – they *looked* like they were made out of matter. Just…

“Are you balloons?” I asked when I got close enough for them to hear me. “How do you float like that?”

“You ruined all our traps!” Fire complained.

“We’re dream spirits,” the bigger one explained. He had a birdlike beak that still looked soft and squishable and deformed with his expressions. “So kind of like balloons without the outer covering?”

“Here watch,” said the other, the ‘frilled lizard’ I’d mentioned earlier. He twisted himself around until he exploded into a cloud of mist, that swooped around the room rapidly before reconstituting itself into a lizard again. I stared, speechless, along with everyone else.

“Do you even have brains?” Dot asked. “How are supposed to scan you?”

“Are you calling me stupid?” the bigger one said, getting even bigger. Dot recoiled and cowered. He laughed and gave her a hug. “Just kidding. But we can think and dream and use magic so whatever dream magic you were going to use on us should work fine.”

“There’s no such thing as magic,” Breeze said, which most of us probably agreed with but thankfully our visitors didn’t seem to notice.

Anyway, Dot put the brain-scan helmet on their heads – squishing their heads to fit inside since they were a bit bigger than kobold heads – and set it running. It didn’t immediately light up in red error lights or anything, so I guessed that it was working but what did I know.

“So this scan will let you make a charm to let us better connect to your shared dream?” one of them asked.

“The device is already built, but we need to know how to read and write to your brain for it to actually work,” Dot explained.

“Some sort of mind-control helmet?”

“Not directly,” Dot said. “It only writes sensations.” They continued to stare at her, dubious. “Sensations can be intense.”

“But we don’t do that!” I added quickly. “I mean not unless you want them, like if you’re playing a really realistic fighting game or having virtual sex or something.”

“What’s sex?” asked the smaller one.

“Wave, why don’t you demonstrate?” Fire suggested, his faceplate showing an evil smirk.

“Um… it takes two,” I said. It’d been a while, so I wasn’t *not* in the mood, but that was still a bit rude.

“So pick someone.”

“Fine, I pick you,” I snapped back at him. “Bend over.”

So we gave the aliens a little demonstration. I sat down in front of them first, and showed them my penis and my vulva and spread my labia so they could look inside, and fingered myself a bit so they could watch me getting erect. Then I bent Fire over one of the couches and gave him a good hard fuck. He curled his tail around my neck, so I cracked my faceplate and bit down on it, just hard enough to hurt a little, and his moans suggested he was enjoying it a lot. I still finished first though, because I *always* lose at sex… I made sure to play it up, moaning loudly and exaggerating the jerky thrusts my instincts were already telling me to make.

“That looks like fun,” the bigger one said. “We don’t have the right bits, though.”

“Well, in the virtual world you can,” I said, while I sat down on the couch next to Fire, giving him a hand-job to try to finish him off. “I mean, if the scan works.” The guest bodies didn’t have genitals and I didn’t know how they’d been connecting before or if they were able to feel anything.

“I don’t know, this is sounding more and more dangerous,” the small one said. “I don’t want to get sucked into your hive mind and not be able to escape.”

“It’s not a hive mind!” Prism snapped.

“It’s a shared dream world built from all your thoughts, isn’t it?”

“No?” Spots said. “It’s a shared virtual world hosted on our peer-to-peer network.” He tapped his faceplate. “On these.”

“Right, in your heads,” the alien said, frowning.

“Not…” I grimaced, then my faceplate blanked as I reached up and took it off. Most of the other kobolds looked away – we *never* took off our faceplates. We were hideous without them! And we couldn’t really make facial expressions because our faces were not cartoons or squishy bags of gas, so we always looked like we were snarling. And we could only talk in Yipyip, which was a horrible language that we never used because we never took off our faceplates. “Yip?” I yipped, in Yipyip, then yipped some more as I tried to swear and then I put my faceplate back on. “It comes off, see?”

“I can’t believe you did that,” Enny said, frowning.

I reached back down to finish finishing off Fire, but he’d managed to completely lose his erection, and scrambled away from me.

“I’ve embarrassed myself enough, so I won’t strip down, but the rest of it comes off too,” I said, tapping my chestplate. “Oh, except my left leg, that’s cybernetic. I mean, it comes off…” I grabbed it firmly, found and unlatched the mental release trigger, and twisted it off at the hip, holding it up in the air. “The bottom part’s still organic, but I broke my leg a few years ago and it was faster to just replace the thigh segment.” I ticked my foot, and it twisted and squirmed as if it was still connected, although of course I couldn’t feel anything with it popped off like that.

This time, it was the aliens that looked horrified. There *were* reasons to take off limbs – usually, to put on other, more specialized limbs, although this wasn’t the sort of mission that needed that so most of us still had our natural ones – so the other kobolds didn’t mind as much, although they were all still staring at me while I clicked it back into place. I massaged my foot until the pins and needles went away.

“So it’s a magical hive mind –” the alien started.

“It’s a *virtual world* that we visit,” Prism said. “We don’t have a hive mind!”

Let me tell you about hive minds. Back… well, I can’t really call it ‘back home’ since I’m many, many generations removed from anyone who ever set foot there, or was even close enough to see the stars in the sky with the unaided eye. But back where we came from, there were not one but *two* hive minds.

One of them was an aggressive swarm, that went from planet to planet kidnapping everyone and forcibly turning them into brainwashed, insectoid versions of themselves. Their victims retained their memory and intelligence and skills, but their will and consciousness were completely subsumed. Everyone hated them but no one could stop them, there were just too many of them.

The other was an evangelizing swarm, that went from planet to planet offering free samples of neuro-link technology and trial memberships, and cogent, convincing arguments for joining that were enthusiastically backed up by everyone who’d ever connected, even after they were cut loose. Everyone hated them but no one could stop them because they didn’t do anything to anyone who didn’t agree to it, and we weren’t *monsters*.

For a long time they were fighting each other, which didn’t really do much to keep them in check but at least it made us feel like there was hope that they’d wipe each other out? But that didn’t happen. Somehow they managed to make peace, and the aggressive swarm stopped deleting its victims’ personalities and the evangelizing swarm stopped taking no for an answer and it was probably not really the worst of both worlds but it was a lot harder to live with. So like any sane collective of engineered creatures designed for deep-space exploration, we ran away.

We’re still running. And interstellar communication being what it is, we have no idea if we’re a thousand light years away from the hive minds’ nearest minions or if they’re right on our heels. I hope it’s the first one.

And I don’t know about everyone else, but what really grates on me is that we’re not even rebelling. We’re still doing the job we were designed for, paving the galaxy with technologically advanced civilizations made up of creatures proven to be susceptible to conversion. They probably don’t even want to catch us.

At any rate, the scan finished successfully somehow, so we handed over the headsets we’d made for them, and the keyboard-and-screen consoles Spots had insisted we make, even though the connection on those is just text so you can’t really do much of anything except talk. The bigger one even put his on! About a dozen of us went virtual with him to make sure it was working from that end, and Spots talked him through registering his account name (‘Shadowfright’, although he explained his real name was Jerome) and setting a password and an icon and then I pounced on him and volunteered to let him use any of the avatars from my collection, because I have a bunch of them. It’s basically what I did in my spare time.

“Do you have any ponies? I always wondered what it was like to be a pony,” Shadowfright said. He was in the default kobold body, but it had a scary face as an icon instead of a number this time, since he wasn’t a guest.

“Um…” I frowned. I’d never really liked hooves. I had a couple of centaurs but they were weasel-centaurs and pangolin-centaurs. I brought out the pangolintaur, which was about twice as big as a kobold and had each scale a different, mismatched rainbow gradient. “Is this close enough?”

“That’s…” he paused. “Colorful. Just like the ponies! I’ll take it.”

He wasn’t eager to try out sex, since Dot had said it would ‘write intense sensations into his brain’ and he didn’t want to trust us *that* far, but he did play around with that avatar and half a dozen others, not all of them mine, and we laughed and talked and petted each other and went swimming and flying and by the time we returned to reality, the other alien had left with his headset and console, to report back.

“I’d better catch up with him, before he tells everyone I had my brain eaten,” Shadowfright said, and ran off into the labyrinth. He got caught in one of the suction-traps some of the others had set up to work better on floating, squishy aliens, and we took him prisoner and tossed the little ball he’d been sucked into around a bit to celebrate before setting him free.

All in all, it seemed like a good start to a relationship.